How golden ages really start—and end
The way to start a 'golden age' is to erect big, beautiful barriers to keep out foreign goods and people. That, at least, is the view of the most powerful man on the planet. Johan Norberg, a Swedish historian, makes the opposite case. In 'Peak Human', Mr Norberg charts the rise and fall of golden ages around the world over the past three millennia, ranging from Athens to the Anglosphere via the Abbasid caliphate. He finds that the polities that outshone their peers did so because they were more open: to trade, to strangers and to ideas that discomfited the mighty. When they closed up again, they lost their shine.
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The spectre of decline is a seductive narrative. How easily nostalgic laments find their own straplines: late capitalism; the eclipse of the West; the collapse of public discourse; the atomisation of society; the impoverishment of the public square; and, as a niche addition, I can't resist including the downward trajectory of Test cricket. Perhaps the narrative arc of societal decline is weirdly in step with the individual ageing process, and we find a perverse personal consolation in believing that the world, or our framing of the world, has also peaked. Even allowing for that tendency, we seem particularly convinced about decline today. Every discipline has its theory about why – economists, for example, tell us that a generation will be miserable if it feels poorer than its parents' demographic. But I wonder if there is something here more fundamental than money. 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'History casts long shadows,' Norberg concludes, 'but also light.' And it is light, in his history, that more often has the last word. The heroic threads are established at the outset and constantly remain in focus: innovation, openness, liberty, commerce, learning, assimilation, enquiry. You always get the point, sometimes a little too bluntly. After introducing classical Greek drama, Norberg adds: 'Netflix would not have been the same without it.' Is he exemplifying or parodying the popular historian's trait of linking everything to the here and now? But if Peak Human is the kind of muscular broad-brush storytelling that academic historians look down on, it is engaging and persuasive. Peak civilisations, of course, are portrayed as constantly in conflict with dark-age duds. First up on the wrong side of history are the Spartans, who Norberg gives such a mauling that you begin to feel sorry for them. 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Baghdad emerges as a nexus of social mobility and commerce, with successful businessmen achieving not only wealth but also corresponding status. So this Islamic 'bourgeois revolution' extended beyond the marketplaces of Athens and Rome, where commerce had still been seen as a necessary evil. (You won't be surprised that Norberg follows his Cato Institute colleague Deirdre McCloskey in recasting 'bourgeois' as an explicitly positive concept.) Norberg's next leaping off point for laissez-faire liberalism is Song dynasty China, where a 12th-century poet observed that 'great ships sail only for profit'. Marauding Mongol hordes rudely interrupt the flow of progress by shrinking the Song state. But with a little help from Marco Polo – who described the old Song capital of Hangzhou as 'the greatest city which may be found in the world, where so many pleasures may be found that one fancies oneself in paradise' – the flame is kept alive in a new cultural and trading crossroads: Venice. 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But of course the shadow of America's own prince of orange, Donald Trump, falls across the page. The next peak for humanity feels distant. Ed Smith is director of the Institute of Sports Humanities Peak Human: What We Can Learn from the Rise and Fall of Golden Ages Johan Norberg Atlantic, 512pp, £22 Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from who support independent bookshops [See also: Dickens's Britain is still with us] Related This article appears in the 04 Jun 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Housing Trap
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